Protecting the President | Graphic: inauguration security | The world waits | A new dawn begins | Words to define history | The disadvantaged will go to the ball | Leading article

On Sunday night I had a dream about Barack Obama. Millions of people do. I was at some meeting, in which activists and officials sat around a long rectangular table. Everyone was dressed informally, and people were making presentations to the group about the things we needed to do. Mr Obama was next to me on my left. He was tired. After a while he fell asleep, and his head rested on my shoulder. Naturally: it was my dream, so it was my shoulder.

It's all wine and concerts right now. Then, later today, the inauguration, and after that the presidency. Every lobby one can imagine - and not a few that one can't - is rushing out press releases advocating that the new president do the particular thing it advocates. In an internet version of a medieval petitioners' hall, lobbyists thrust requests and remonstrances in what they hope is the direction of the increasingly iconic Mr Obama.

It is now a cliché to say that he must inevitably disappoint, and one - as with the worst clichés - that covers almost any meaning, from the possibility of minor failure to his certain imprisonment by the Israel lobby, big business, the arms trade or whichever demons you think rule the fallen world. Only in what he represents can Mr Obama fail to disappoint because that cannot be altered by disillusion.

Woodrow Wilson, that great internationalist and one of the few library card-carrying intellectuals to be elected to the highest office, spoke in his first inaugural address in 1913 about the hardly perceived forces that can underlie an election. The American nation, he said, was seeking to use his victory “to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view”.

“Some old things with which we had grown familiar, and which had begun to creep into the very habit of our thought and of our lives, have altered their aspect as we have latterly looked critically upon them,” he said, while some new things have come to look like the “stuff of our own convictions”.

His thoughts were largely domestic and concerned how working-class Americans and American consumers had been denied even the most basic protection from the depradations of unregulated corporations.

But the thought holds good, that one of the marvels of democracy is how it allows old, almost tyrannical ways of thinking to be seen for what they are, and new possibilities to be imagined. The space is suddenly there. Perhaps the old Administration was overcontent with an unfair world, complacent or querulous in the face of possible environmental catastrophe, sometimes unimaginative in dealing with threats to its security.

The preceding Administration had to fight what we are no longer, seven years on, allowed to call the War on Terror; we can all imagine how it might have been done better, but it was done. George W. Bush's dictum that “he who is not with me is against me” may have clarified a certain moment in that struggle, but at a cost. Arguably it helped to create the circumstances in which torture was permitted and Abu Ghraib allowed to happen, and certainly legitimised, and it made easier a widespread antagonism towards the US. Mr Obama's election now allows many around the world who have become entrenched in their rejection of the Bushite formulas to emerge from their bunkers and look at the world again. It gives them space.

Mr Obama is temperamentally averse to creating polarities. It was assumed by some that, after the imagined “hard power” of Texan foreign policy, would come the antithetical “soft power” of the fluffy Hawaiian, in which President Ahmadinejad would be garlanded at JFK by a line of hijabbed lei queens. No, said his Secretary of State- designate, Hillary Clinton, last week. We are for “smart power” using, “the full range of tools at our disposal - diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural - picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of our foreign policy.”

What makes such a transition psychologically possible for Mr Obama is his easy admission of self-doubt. It was there in his book Dreams from My Father, when he recalled dealing with a pair of white-blaming Chicago pols in his community activist days. “Both Marty and Smalls,” he wrote, “knew that in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty - and that one man's certainty threatens another's. I realised then that I was a heretic. Or worse - for even a heretic must believe in something, if nothing more than the truth of his own doubt.” So Mr Obama doubted the truth of his own doubt, yet obviously didn't find his uncertainty crippling. “You seem like you know what you're doing,” another activist tells him. He replies: “I don't, Mona. I don't have a clue.” That doubt creates a space.

What does Mr Obama himself intend to do in office is, naturally, everyone's first question. But if it is another cliché that he is not the Almighty, cannot transubstantiate or create life in the Virgin's womb, then for his presidency to fulfil the rest of us, it requires something from the rest of us - from those around the world who imagine themselves friends of democracy, or who just want a better and safer life, or a guarantee to our great-great- grandchildren of any life at all. In fact, it demands a response from all but the most purblind, hate-filled or fanatical. What will we do - a coalition of the possibly willing - with the room we now have?

Obama may expend capital in a Middle East peace process, but what might the opportunity of such a president permit, say Israel, to do or to offer that could give early hope to the majority of Palestinians? If Mr Obama works at getting Congress to lift the Cuban embargo, what will Latin American states do actively to encourage democracy in that fascinating but unfree island?

What extra effort can the governments and political parties of Germany and other recalcitrant Nato countries make to persuade their peoples that Mr Obama's plea for increased help in Afghanistan should be met? What work are statesmen of goodwill prepared to put in to reform completely the UN, so that it reaches even Level One in its ability to prevent genocide and uphold the most basic human rights?

If the US fully embraces the need for action over climate change, can other countries not be more flexible in their own attitude towards their responsibility for emission controls?

Before we all pile our own demands on the new president's head perhaps our self-injunction should be, not to ask what Obama can do for us, but ask rather what we can do for Obama. After inauguration day, the responsibility should be shared by as many of us as can do what is needed. And though it isn't important to anyone but me, that is what I think the dream meant.

Times Recommends

• A dose of defeat is just the medicine
• Protecting ourselves from Eurocreep
• After the summer of LUV, it'll still hurt